Mechanism for evaluating requests prior to disposition in a multi-threaded environment

Abstract

A mechanism is provided for enabling a request to be evaluated prior to the request being disposed. Particularly, an evaluation function is associated with a thread pool. Whenever a thread is to be assigned from that thread pool, the evaluation function may be invoked. The evaluation function may be invoked in response to one or more conditions being satisfied, or it may be invoked each time a thread is needed from that thread pool. When invoked, the evaluation function performs an evaluation on the request. Based upon the evaluation, the evaluation function may take one or more actions. For example, if the evaluation function determines that the request is a high priority request, then it may ensure that the request will be processed regardless of system workload. The evaluation function is user specifiable; thus, it may be programmed to perform any desired operations, and to take any desired considerations and factors into account. Overall, the evaluation function gives a user great freedom in determining how to dispose of a request.